Leadership: It can be part of all of us

As a foreign correspondent in Beijing, I once sneaked into a military hospital to interview Chairman Mao’s grandson.

Mao Xinyu was morbidly obese, and the only way he could lose weight was through a hospital-enforced regimen.

At 23, he was studying for a master’s degree in Mao Zedong Thought. He had never been interviewed, so I seized the opportunity to ask what he wanted to be when he grew up.

“A leader," he replied, without mis­sing a beat.

Alas, too many of our leaders think that way. But when leaders begin to think of leadership as a job category, as many politicians and chief executive officers do, they can lose their way.

They focus so much on getting re­elected or reappointed that they lag rather than lead. They rule by focus group and opinion poll and boardroom approval.

That is the bad news.

The good news is ordinary individuals can be leaders.

Anyone can lead by standing up for what is right, through the choices he or she makes every day.

If you intervene when someone is getting bullied, you make a difference. If you reproach someone who has just cracked a racist, sexist or homophobic joke, you change the conversation.

Always remember: there is no such thing as an innocent bystander.

In the 1970s, numerous juries in Quebec and Ontario acquitted Dr. Henry Morgentaler of criminal charges. Each time, he readily admitted per­forming abortions, but each time the jury declared that no crime had been committed. The leadership of these or­dinary jurors ultimately led to a 1988 Supreme Court ruling that our abortion law was a violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

When individuals take stands, they can change history.

In 1946, Viola Desmond was jailed after refusing to move from the whites­only section of a New Glasgow movie theatre. Prosecutors ignored the race is­sue. Instead, they charged that she had failed to pay the one-cent tax differen­tial between the whites-only seating area and the blacks-only balcony.

Desmond, a 33-year-old black beau­tician from Halifax, was convicted of tax evasion, fined $20 and sentenced to 30 days in jail. She remained unbowed. And the ensuing outrage ultimately forced the Nova Scotia government to abolish its segregation laws.

Leaders believe they can — and must — change the world. A true leader takes a stance without parsing personal risk.

Last April, Raymond Taavel didn’t hesitate to intervene in a fight outside a Halifax gay bar. One of the two men in­volved, a mentally ill patient on a one­hour pass from the East Coast Forensic Hospital , is accused of beating Taavel, a 49-year-old gay activist, to death.

Half a world away, in the Swat Valley in Pakistan, Malala Yousafzai, 15, dared to stand up for girls’ rights. “How dare the Taliban take away my basic right to education?" she told the local press.

Malala was aware of the risks: she had seen the corpses of beheaded po­licemen strung up in the town square. Both she and her father, an educator, had received death threats.

Last October, a Taliban gunman boarded her school bus and shot her in the head and neck.

Miraculously, Malala survived. After Pakistani doctors stabilized her, she was flown to England for further treat­ment.

Perhaps Malala should have donned a burka and stayed safely indoors, but by taking a stand, she rallied her community, her country and the world.

Most of us lack the epic courage of a Malala. But if you feel hesitant about speaking out within the safe confines of Canada, please know that one person can indeed persuade the crowd.

In 1961, soon after the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Yale psychologist named Stanley Milgram pondered the Nazi war criminal’s defence: In sending mil­lions of Jews to their deaths, Eichmann said he was merely following orders.

Milgram soon launched a series of famous experiments on the dynamics of obedience.

He found that people willingly obeyed orders to administer increas­ingly powerful electronic shocks to oth­ers, even when the victim — an actor — pleaded to be released or even com­plained of a heart condition.

Prodded along by the experimenter, more than half the participants de­livered the maximum “shock."

But, in a later experiment, Milgram also found that if anyone present objec­ted, the obedience rate of participants plummeted. All it took was one person to refuse the order to administer the maximum “shock," and the vast major­ity also refused.

In other words, each one of us is responsible. Leadership is too import­ant to be left to leaders alone.